Berlin has a more unusual tourist attraction in the Wedding district, not far from the Panke river.
The “cage” in which Kevin-Prince Boateng learned to play football is located in a park on Travemünder Strasse.
One or the other city hike that leads here is recommended on the Internet - to a place of pilgrimage of a special kind.
After football had thought for a while that it could become more and more predictable and data acquisition would turn players into interchangeable factors in tactically sophisticated formations, the pendulum has long since swung in the opposite direction. Now you are looking for “types” again, for skills that can only be practiced to a limited extent because they are shaped by the energy of life and survival on the street. One looks for talents who can play their way out of the cage into the open air.
That was definitely the case with Kevin-Prince Boateng, even if his brother Jérôme then had the bigger career. And he grew up in the bourgeois district of Charlottenburg. At Hertha BSC there were a number of other "street footballers" in the noughties. Some of them are now the focus of the documentary series "Underground of Berlin", which the streaming service DAZN starts on Friday. Änis Ben-Hatira, Chinedu Ede, Ashkan Dejagah. They all belong to a generation that could have shaped the capital city club. But then it often stayed with a few great moments.
The “Prince” has since returned to Hertha and tries not to damage his role as a figure of identification by occasionally appearing on the pitch. In “Underground of Berlin” he functions as a kind of chairman: from the armchair, in a very cool suit, he comments on the city and football mythology that Matthias Faidt and Marco Gundel create. The popular series “4 Blocks”, which tells of German-Arab families in Neukölln, peeps around the corner all the time and is also supposed to broadcast on “Underground of Berlin”.
Fortunately, the series makers don't overdo it with stylization. There's no need either, because the protagonists are interesting enough. The focus of the first three episodes (more to follow in the new year) are Chinedu Ede and Änis Ben-Hatira. Ede says of himself that he “was brought up by intellectuals in a very anti-social area”. His father came to Germany from Nigeria in 1971, he works as a graduate engineer, his mother is a teacher. In his youth, Chinedu was often said to have “one on the waffle”. In “Underground of Berlin” he now shows himself to be a reflective, mature young man who is very good at assessing how his life has gone so far.
Änis Ben-Hatira, who had to terminate a contract with Darmstadt 98 in 2017 because he had donated to a Muslim aid organization suspected of Salafism, was particularly rich in controversial topics.
Faidt and Gundel apparently stay at a safe distance for the time being on the subject of religion, the first "season" (de facto three almost half-hour episodes) is initially about the young Änis, who was nicknamed "Maradöna" because he had the skills of Maradona with a profound knowledge of the best kebab shops in Berlin.